Location



The seminar is held in hybrid format, in person (Múzeum krt. 4/i Room 224) and online.

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10 November (Friday) 4:15 PM  Room 224 + ONLINE
Péter Szűcs
Department of English Linguistic
University of Debrecen
 
Deixis and demonstratives – an overview with special attention to Hungarian clausal prolepsis

The originally Greek word "deixis," which means "pointing," in linguistics refers to words, expressions, or structures for which the interpretation is based on the speaker's relation to some spatial, temporal, or some other abstract coordinate system. Demonstrative pronouns (this, that, etc.) are prototypical members of this category, but in a broader sense, demonstrative gestures, verbs like come and go, adverbs like tomorrow and yesterday, or adjectives right and left also belong here.

In my talk I will give an overview of the theoretical and empirical landscape regarding deixis in general, and demonstrative pronouns in particular, with special attention to Hungarian. We are going to see that the naíve view, whereby "proximal" pronouns refer to something close and "distal" ones referring to something far is far too simplistic to capture the totality of the data. As Peeters et al. (2021) suggests, what is needed is a conceptual framework whereby various physical factors (distance, visibility, etc.), psychological factors (psychological distance, attention, contrast etc.), referent-intrinsic factors (size, animacy, semantic type etc.) and the syntactic/semantic properties of the demonstrative pronoun itself all have to be taken into consideration for understanding the meaning and usage of demonstrative.

Apart from the more widely studied spatio-temporal uses, I will also explicate how these factors come into play with a more special use of demonstratives: clausal prolepsis in Hungarian, see (1) and Szűcs (2022) for an overview.

(1)   János azt mondta,        hogy        Kati nagyon okos.

        John     that.acc    said.3sg    comp   Kate very   smart

        'John said that Kate is very smart.' (Lit.: 'John thatdem said thatcomp Kate is very smart.')

I will argue that the proper understanding of such a construction is not possible without a nuanced view of the interplay of referentiality and deictic features.

References

Peeters, David & Krahmer, Emiel & Maes, Alfons. 2021. A conceptual framework for the study of demonstrative reference. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 28. 409-433.

Szűcs Péter. 2022. Constructions with propositional proforms. Proceedings of the LFG'22 Conference. 345-364.



17 November (Friday) 4:15 PM  Room 224 + ONLINE
Zalán Molnár
Department of Logic, Institute of Philosophy
Eötvös University Budapest
 
Variations on the ultrafilter extensions - the many different ways
In this talk we focus on the two well-known types of ultrafilter extensions of models investigated in the literature, the first one having its roots in model theory and was systematically studied e.g. in [1], whereas the second originates from universal algebra and modal logics. [2] centers around the second extension by introducing many other ''good'' candidates besides the canonical ones that are still suitable for the Jónnson-Tarski theorem. In this talk we show that the preservation of first-order formulas under taking the first extensions is not recursively enumerable, hence answering an open problem from [1]. Also we continue the works of [2] by answering some of its questions, and extending its algebraic investigations.
References:
[1] Denis Saveliev (2012). On ultrafilter extensions of models. in S.D. Friedman et al. (ed.), The Infinity Project Proc. CRM Documents 11, Barcelona, 599-616.
[2] B. Farkas, A. Simon. How canonical extensions are canonical? Manuscript.


24 November (Friday) 4:15 PM  Room 224 + ONLINE
Judit X. Madarász and Gergely Székely
Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest
 
Hajnal Andréka's conjecture on concept algebras of classical and relativistic spacetimes
Hajnal Andréka considered two first-order models, one for classical spacetime and one for special relativistic spacetime. Her conjecture was that there is no concept algebra (cylindric algebra) between the concept algebras of these two spacetimes. We proved that this conjecture is true. This implies that relativistic spacetime (up to definitional equivalence) is the only proper reduct of classical spacetime that contains the concept of lightlike relatedness. In some sense, this means that there is no theory between special relativity theory and the kinematics of the late 19th century.